Chương 8
The door opened.
Richard stood there.
He did not enter.
“Mara said I could ask.”
Mara closed her book.
“He can ask. You can say no.”
Elena looked at Richard.
“What?”
“Can I sit with you?”
The question almost undid her.
Not because it was tender.
Because Richard Vale had never asked permission to sit anywhere in his life.
She nodded.
He came in and took the chair across from her.
For a while neither spoke.
Richard studied the marble floor.
“There are things Victoria told me,” he said. “About what happened after.”
Elena’s fingers tightened around the edge of the pillow.
“I don’t want to hear her version right now.”
“Okay.”
Silence again.
He looked at her phone.
“Do you have photographs?”
Elena frowned.
“Of what?”
“Your life.”
The question was so ordinary she could not answer immediately.
“Yes.”
“Could I see one?”
She looked at him.
“Why one?”
“Because asking for twelve years feels rude.”
A laugh escaped her.
It hurt less this time.
She opened the photo app.
There were thousands.
She scrolled past receipts, a dog in a red sweater, street signs, flowers, a refrigerator shelf, screenshots, a badly framed sunset.
Richard watched without comment.
Elena finally found one.
She was sitting at a picnic table beside a woman with dark curls and a small boy holding a melting ice cream cone. Elena’s hair was shorter. She wore sunglasses and was laughing.
Richard looked at the photograph for a long time.
“Who are they?”
“My friend Tessa and her son, Milo.”
“Where?”
“Portland.”
“You live in Oregon?”
“I did.”
“Do?”
“Mostly.”
He nodded.
It was strange how quickly information about her became precious.
“What do you do?”
Elena glanced at Mara, embarrassed without knowing why.
“I restore books.”
Richard blinked.
“Books.”
“Old ones.”
“I understood the noun.”
She smiled.
“You looked surprised.”
“I expected—”
He stopped.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“A more impressive career?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his forehead.
“Probably.”
“That’s very you.”
“I’m trying not to be very me.”
“Good luck.”
Mara lowered her eyes to hide a smile.
Richard nodded toward the photograph.
“You look happy.”
“I was.”
“Are you?”
Elena locked the phone.
“Sometimes.”
He accepted that.
After a minute he said, “I have your room.”
She went still.
“At the house.”
“I know what you meant.”
“I kept it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at him.
He corrected himself.
“I know. I just don’t have a good answer.”
“That’s different.”
“Yes.”
He stared at his folded coat.
“I thought moving anything would be another death.”
Elena felt something sharp beneath her ribs.
She had spent years imagining Richard erasing her.
Selling her things.
Closing her accounts.
Replacing photographs.
Instead he had preserved a room she no longer wanted.
Both possibilities hurt.
“Did you go in?”
“Not for a year.”
“Then?”
“Sometimes.”
“What did you do?”
Richard looked embarrassed.
“Watered a plant.”
She stared.
“What plant?”
“The stupid jade thing on the windowsill.”
Elena began laughing.
Mara looked up.
Richard smiled despite himself.
“It died.”
“Obviously.”
“I tried.”
“You overwater everything.”
“I learned that eventually.”
“You learned after it died.”
“Yes.”
She pressed a hand to her ribs, not because they hurt anymore but because laughter had awakened an old memory of pain.
The room settled.
Richard said quietly, “I missed you.”
Elena stopped smiling.
He did not look at her.
“I know that doesn’t fix anything.”
“No.”
“I know you had reasons.”
“I had bad reasons too.”
He looked up.
“I stayed gone after I knew some of what Victoria said wasn’t true.”
“How long?”
“Years.”
“Why?”
Elena stared at the dark screen of her phone.
“At first I was scared of her. Then I was scared of what coming back would mean.”
“To me?”
“To everyone.”
“Celia’s family.”
She nodded.
Richard’s face tightened.
“Elena.”
“I let them believe she ran away.”
“What?”
“Victoria told the police the surviving passenger was Celia. After I left, Celia was technically missing.”
Richard stared at her.
“And the body was you.”
“Legally.”
“My God.”
“I found out when I searched online two years later.”
Richard looked sick.
“There were posters?”
“Yes.”
“Her parents?”
“They spent years looking.”
Elena swallowed.
“That’s the grave.”
Richard frowned.
“The grave Victoria mentioned?”
Elena nodded.
“Celia is in my grave.”
The statement sat between them.
“She was buried under my name. Her parents never had a body. They never knew where she was.”
Richard lowered his head.
“And you knew.”
“Eventually.”
“Why didn’t you tell them?”
Elena’s eyes filled.
“Because then I would have had to tell everyone.”
Richard’s instinct was to say something forgiving.
He stopped himself.
Elena noticed.
“Go ahead.”
“What?”
“Say it.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“That I was a coward.”
He looked at her.
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
The answer came without drama.
“I was twenty-two when I found the missing-person page. I had a job at a print shop in Maine. I had changed my last name. I was sleeping four hours a night because every time a car slowed outside my apartment I thought Victoria had found me. I stared at Celia’s mother’s phone number for three days.”
Richard said nothing.
“I didn’t call.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted my life more than I wanted to do the right thing.”
Richard leaned back.
It hurt him to hear.
That mattered less than whether she needed to say it.
Elena looked toward the windows.
“I kept telling myself I would do it when I had proof. When I had money. When I had a lawyer. When I was less scared. Then a year became three. Three became eight.”
“Why now?”
“My friend Tessa got sick last year.”
Richard looked at her.
“She’s okay,” Elena said. “Cancer. Treatment worked. But there was a month when we didn’t know that.”
Her thumb rubbed over the seam of the travel pillow.
“Milo asked me if I would be his emergency contact if she died.”
May you like
Richard waited.
“I realized nobody could put me on school paperwork because half the records connected to my legal name said I was dead.”
